Summary of the NovelLord of the Flies is set at a vague point in the future during an atomic war. A planeload of British schoolchildren is shot down and marooned on a deserted island. There are no adults present.

As the story opens, the jungle on the island is severely scarred from the wreckage of the plane. Two boys, the fair-haired, charismatic Ralph, and the fat, asthmatic, thickly bespectacled Piggy, emerge from the jungle.

While they are swimming in a shallow pool inside a lagoon, Ralph discovers a beautiful conch shell. Piggy, slightly smarter, suggests he blow it as a signal for other survivors.

One by one, boys of varying ages from six to twelve appear from the jungle. Among them are several older boys, identical twins Sam and Eric (sometimes referred to as Samneric due to their lack of individual identity), the quiet but strange Roger, thoughtful Simon, and charismatic Jack Merridew, leader of the choir.

While absorbing the view, the boys come upon a wild piglet caught in some creeper vines. Jack takes out a large knife and prepares to kill the pig. He hesitates, and the pig escapes. Jack is upset by what he perceives to be Ralph’s condemnation of his hesitation. He silently vows to himself, “Next time there would be no mercy.”

Later, Ralph uses the conch to call another meeting. It is decided that whoever holds the conch shell will have the right to speak at the meetings. A small boy with a mulberry-colored birthmark obscuring half of his face receives the conch. He tells the others of a “beastie” that comes in the dark and wants to eat him. Some deny its existence, but Jack vows to hunt it when he and his hunters hunt pig for meat.

Next, the boys decide that they must make a signal fire on the mountain to attract ships to rescue them. They gather wood and use Piggy’s glasses to start the fire. In their exuberance and inexperience, they allow the fire to rage out of control and it consumes a large portion of the jungle. The small boy with the mulberry-colored birthmark disappears and is never seen again. It is implied he was killed in the fire.

Jack quickly learns the art of hunting, but still hasn’t gotten a pig. While he hunts, Ralph and Simon build poorly constructed shelters on the beach from palm trunks and fronds. Jack returns from his unsuccessful hunt, and he and Ralph clash over the decision to hunt or build the shelters.

Simon discovers a secret place in the jungle. It is a hollow completely obscured by creeper vines. He sits here, away from the others, and contemplates the beauty of the jungle.

As time passes, the boys begin to resemble less and less the civilized British schoolchildren they used to be. Their uniforms deteriorate and their hair grows long and ragged. A marked boundary begins to grow between the younger children (littluns) who play all day, and the older children (biguns) who seem to be growing divided as to their responsibilities.

Ralph, Piggy, Simon, Sam and Eric see the need for order and civilization, while Jack and his hunters become obsessed with the ideas of finding meat and protecting the littluns from the beast.

Jack introduces his hunters to the notion of camouflaging their features with red and white clay and black charcoal for hunting. This gradual masking of their identities allows them to become more ruthless and effective hunters.

Presently, the smoke from a ship passing the island is discovered, but Jack and the hunters, preoccupied with hunting, have let the signal fire they were tending go out. Jack returns from the hunt, triumphant over killing a pig and slitting its throat himself, only to be rebuffed by Ralph for neglecting the fire.

The boys clash on the matter, but eventually all share in consuming the meat. Ralph calls another meeting to deal with the situation involving the signal fire. Another littlun, Phil, speaks of his dreams of the beast. This again inspires Jack to lobby for the necessity of his hunters. He and Ralph argue again over the importance of the signal fire versus the meat. Jack declares his disgust and he and his hunters leave the meeting.

Ralph considers giving up being chief. Piggy, who fears Jack, tries to convince him not to.

That night, unseen by the castaways, there is a fight between aircraft ten miles in the sky over the island. A dead parachutist lands on the side of the mountain in a sitting position. The wind, catching in the parachute, makes the figure rock back and forth.

The boys, thinking it is the beast, argue over whether or not to approach it. The boys, led by Ralph with an angry Jack in tow, travel to the mountainside to see the beast. Jack sees the natural bridge to the island’s outcropping. He decides that the separate island, joined to the main island by a rock ledge, would make a great fort. It contains many rocks that could be rolled onto the approach path to kill enemies. He and Ralph argue again, and Jack verbally denies any further loyalty to the conch and its power.

The boys’ continued expedition to the figure on the mountain is interrupted when the boys flush a boar. Ralph wounds it when it charges him. The boar escapes, but they celebrate the encounter with another primitive blood lust dance in which Robert, pretending to be the pig, is beaten by the hunters who are overly excited by the dance. Ralph’s bravery in the face of the boar’s charge is forgotten.

As the day wanes, most of the boys have returned to the shelters, but Ralph, Jack, and Roger have pressed on and apprehensively approach the figure. The wind causes it to move and the boys see its decaying face in the darkness. They all flee.

At the next meeting, Jack and Ralph question each other’s bravery on the mountain. Jack convinces his hunters to separate themselves from the rest.

Following Piggy’s suggestion Ralph, Simon, and Samneric try to maintain a signal fire down off the mountain, away from Jack and his hunters. Jack orders his hunters to kill a pig for a feast, hoping that the roasting meat will draw the others’ loyalty away from Ralph. They kill a pig and he orders them to mount its head on a stick as a sacrifice for the beast.

Simon, who had been in his hiding place, contemplates the head of the boar that the hunters had unknowingly impaled near him. He imagines a conversation with the head, and begins to see in it the source of evil on the island. He has an epileptic seizure. He awakens, and the head again reveals itself to him as the symbol of anarchy on the island. Simon has a second seizure.

Simon awakens again and climbs the mountain to view the figure of the dead parachutist that the boys believe is the beast. He discovers that it is harmless, and that the true nature of what the boys should fear, the real beast, is symbolized by the pig’s head. He returns to tell the others.

Meanwhile, Jack and his hunters roast the pig, and the others, including Ralph and Piggy, join the feast. Ralph and Jack argue again and most of the boys side with Jack this time. Ralph tries to convince them that they need shelters, but Jack distracts them by commanding another blood lust dance. The boys become so swept up in the dance that Simon, emerging from the forest, is mistaken for the beast. All the boys, marginally including Ralph and Piggy, beat him to death. The tide sweeps his body out to sea.

Back at the shelters, Ralph, Piggy, and Samneric contemplate their roles in Simon’s death. That night, Jack and his hunters attack them and steal Piggy’s glasses for a fire.

The next day, Ralph, Samneric, and Piggy approach Castle Rock, where Jack’s tribe has gathered, to demand the return of Piggy’s glasses. Ralph wants to reestablish the power of the conch.

He and Samneric approach the hunters while Piggy and the conch stay on the stone bridge. Jack and Ralph argue again while the hunters take Samneric prisoner. Roger releases a rock they had rigged to guard the bridge. It falls on Piggy, smashes the conch, and plunges Piggy over the edge to his death.

Ralph escapes and the hunters hunt him. He hides near Castle Rock but only manages to learn that Roger has tortured Samneric into joining the hunt. Samneric now fear Roger, the sadist, more than Jack.

Eventually, the hunters corner Ralph in Simon’s old hiding place. They flush him from concealment with a fire. Ralph manages to escape to the beach with the hunters right behind.

He comes face to face with a shocked naval officer. A battle cruiser has docked in the lagoon, drawn by the smoke from Jack’s fire. The officer is appalled at the savage condition of the children. Ralph assumes responsibility for what appears to be poor leadership. Ralph begins to weep for the three dead children and the castaways’ loss of innocence.

Jack emerges onto the beach without his hunting camouflage or weapons. Only Piggy’s broken glasses on his belt give any indication of his previous savagery.

One of the littluns cannot remember his own name. The officer, embarrassed by what he mistakenly perceives to be Ralph’s undignified relief at rescue, turns away and stares at his warship in the lagoon.

Estimated Reading Time

Lord of the Flies contains 12 chapters ranging in length from nine to 23 pages, with an average length of 15 pages. Each chapter can probably be read in 45 to 60 minutes. A range of 10 to 15 hours should be allowed for reading time of the novel.

Castaways and Adventurers

It is often noted that The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) by R. M. Ballantyne, was a major literary influence in Golding’s writing Lord of the Flies, although Golding’s tale turns the juvenile-adventure genre into a dark exploration of human nature. In Ballantyne’s novel, three boys, two of whom are named Ralph and Jack, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they survive by relying on each other and their wits; building a boat, they travel beyond the island, face numerous dangers courageously, and triumph. Before Ralph, the narrator, relates their adventures, he reminds readers that they are about to enter “regions of fun.”

Lord of the Flies takes readers into entirely different regions of experience, but it adheres in many ways to elements in The Coral Island. Like Ballantyne’s novel, Lord of the Flies is a Robinsonade, the genre of adventure fiction established by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Golding’s boys, like Ballantyne’s, experience a disaster that places them without adult supervision in a tropical paradise, a wild place far removed from civilization. They build shelters and forage for food. Before they are overwhelmed with fear and “things are breaking up,” Golding’s castaways explore the island in the spirit of youthful adventure. Setting out on an expedition, “[a] kind of glamour was spread over them … they were conscious of the glamour and made happy by it.” Filled with excitement, they talk and laugh together in the “bright” air and work together to climb to the top of the mountain. As they stand on the summit, Ralph speaks for all as they survey the island spread out below: “This belongs to us,” he declares, unaware of what lies ahead when adventure becomes a nightmare.

Echoes of Conrad and Kurtz

The literary parallels between Lord of the Flies and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, are inescapable. In both novels, living in isolation from society drives human beings into a savage state characterized by unspeakable acts, suggesting that being “civilized” is learned behavior that masks mankind’s true nature. When the constraints of society no longer hold the human animal in check, what Golding refers to as “man’s essential illness” is unleashed. Sigmund Freud identified it as the Id, the primitive force in the human psyche that demands the gratification of urges wired into human beings through biology.

Golding’s anarchist Jack Merridew and Conrad’s Kurtz, the ivory trader who creates his own kingdom deep in the Congo, both personify the Id. As Jack presides over a pig roast, wearing a garland of flowers and sitting on a makeshift throne, the boys at his feet, the image is reminiscent of Kurtz’s being worshiped by the natives at the trading company’s Central Station where he wields absolute power. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator, observes that “Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts”; Jack, also, lacks restraint, becoming more and more savage in satisfying his lust to dominate life on the island until he bears no resemblance to his former civilized self, just as Kurtz dies bearing no resemblance to the man mourned by his fiancée in Brussels. Kurtz, Marlow says, is “hollow at the core”; so too is Jack, devoid of conscience and human empathy.

Echoes of Heart of Darkness are found throughout Golding’s novel. The sow’s head affixed to a spear mirrors the image of human heads impaled on pikes at Kurtz’s station. Roger’s hunting Ralph with a spear sharpened at both ends suggests that a similar fate awaits Ralph before he is rescued. As Simon converses with the horrible sow’s head, it smiles; when Marlow views one of the human heads in Kurtz’s collection, he observes that it is smiling.

In “Notes on Lord of the Flies,” published in the Penguin Putnam edition of the novel, E. L. Epstein points out the similarity between Simon’s vision of the sow’s head and Marlow’s description of Kurtz. “Simon imagines he is looking into a vast mouth,” Epstein writes, a mouth which Conrad describes as having “blackness within” that spreads. Feeling that he has been drawn inside the mouth, Simon loses consciousness. The passage, Epstein observes, echoes Marlow’s description of the dying Kurtz: “I saw [him] open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.” Golding, Epstein contends, “seems very close to Conrad, both in basic principles and in artistic method.” The conclusion of Lord of the Flies supports Epstein’s analysis: Ralph recognizes “the darkness in man’s heart” and weeps.

Video: Overview

Lord of the Flies opens with schoolboys wandering out of the jungle, into which their plane has crashed, and onto the beach of a remote island. In this isolated setting, the boys first try to maintain a veneer of civilization, but they soon shed it to exhibit the evil that is inborn. Golding tells the story from the boys’ perspective until the final few pages, where he then alters the perspective to enlarge the context. Little boys are not the only ones who have savagery at their core; the grown-ups do as well.

The first two boys to emerge, Ralph, an easygoing but fairly responsible boy, and Piggy, a thinker who is fat and asthmatic, gather the rest of the boys by sounding a conch shell. At their first assembly, the boys recognize the need for some rules: “After all, we’re not savages. We’re English.” They elect Ralph chief and make Jack the leader of the boys who will hunt for food and keep a signal fire going.

Before long, the boys’ immaturity and irresponsibility are clear and are a source of frustration to Ralph and Piggy. After building a couple of shelters, the boys would rather swim and roll rocks than work. The hunters would rather hunt than follow through on their other job of keeping a signal fire going. As a result, they miss the chance to signal a passing ship.

Immaturity and irresponsibility soon give way to violence and fear-inspired frenzy as the last vestiges of the veneer of civilization disappear. For Jack the early fun of hunting becomes a compulsion to track down and kill. He teaches his hunters to circle and close in on their prey, and in the circle the boys become bloodthirsty savages.

Fear works to intensify the power of the mob. Some of the little boys are afraid of a “beastie,” and their fear spreads to all the boys. Only one boy, Simon, has the insight to know that the beast is inside them and the savagery they have always suppressed is what they should fear. Seeing something move among the rocks, the boys conclude that they have found the beast and are terrified. Only Simon has the courage to investigate. He finds a dead aviator, his parachute lines entangled in the rocks. Exhausted from his search and sick at what he has found, Simon crawls down the mountain, arriving on the beach to find himself in the middle of a circle of madly dancing, paint-smeared boys. In a blind frenzy, somehow thinking Simon is the beast crawling toward them, they kill him.

Although Piggy refers to Simon’s death as an accident, Ralph knows it was murder and says he is scared “of us.” Like Simon, Ralph knows the beast is within; he becomes the next scapegoat. The circle is closing on Ralph when the boys are rescued by officers from a cruiser. The perspective changes immediately. One officer remarks, “Fun and games.” He asks Ralph jokingly, “Having a war or something? . . . Nobody killed, I hope? Any dead bodies?” The reader knows, as Ralph does, the awful truth of two dead bodies. The officer’s naïveté reinforces the irony of the entire novel. The boys come out of a world at war. They land in an idyllic spot where their basic needs are met and where they can escape the carnage of the adult world. Since evil is within them, however, they, too, war on one another. They return, finally, to a world at war because escape from the island is not escape from evil. Evil is in the hearts of people.

An airplane evacuating a group of British schoolboys from a war zone crashes on a Pacific island, killing all the adults aboard. Two of the surviving boys, Ralph and a boy nicknamed Piggy, find a conch shell and use it as a horn to summon the other survivors, including the members of a boys’ choir headed by Jack Merridew. An election is held to decide on a leader. Jack has the choir members’ grudging support, but Ralph possesses the conch and is elected chief. Jack and his choir become hunters.

Later, Ralph calls an assembly to set rules. The first rule is that holding the conch gives one the right to speak. A young boy about six years old asks what will be done about the “snake-thing” he has seen. Ralph insists that no such thing exists and changes the subject to the possibility of rescue. He orders the boys to make a fire atop the mountain to signal rescuers. Jack volunteers his choir to keep the fire going. Using Piggy’s glasses to focus the sun’s rays on some fuel, they light a fire. It leaps out of control, and in the resulting confusion, the boy who had asked about the “snake-thing” disappears. He is not seen again.

Jack, obsessed with the desire to kill a wild pig, and Ralph, who wants to erect shelters, are often at odds, dividing the boys’ allegiance. One day, Ralph spots the smoke from a ship out at sea. Looking up at the mountaintop, he discovers that the boys’ signal fire has gone out. Desperately, he and Simon claw their way up the mountainside, but they are too late to start the fire again in time for the passing ship to see it. Below, they see Jack and his hunters (who should have been tending the fire) carrying the carcass of a pig. Jack is ecstatic, exclaiming over the spilled blood. When Ralph admonishes him for letting the fire die, Jack lashes out, breaking a lens of Piggy’s glasses.

Meanwhile, a veiled fear has begun to spread, especially among the youngest boys, the “littluns,” of something that haunts the night. At an assembly, Ralph tries to insist that the rules be followed and the fire kept burning, but discussion turns to the “beast,” and the gathering soon degenerates into chaos, with Jack refusing to abide by Ralph’s rules.

One day, a victim of the air war being fought overhead falls from the sky in a parachute. He lies against the rocks, dead, buffeted by the wind. Sam and Eric (twin brothers later dubbed “Samneric”) are tending the signal fire when they see the corpse, and they run back to camp, screaming that they have seen the beast. Leaving Piggy to watch the littluns, Jack and Ralph go to search the far end of the island, thinking the beast might live there, but find nothing.

Night falls, and Jack challenges Ralph to accompany him up the mountain in the darkness to seek the beast. At the top of the mountain, near the place where the boys have built their fire, they see a dark shape and, when the wind blows, a skeletal face. They flee in terror. Back at the base camp, Jack seizes the conch and speaks out against Ralph, asking the boys to vote, by a show of hands, to reject him as chief. When the boys refuse, Jack goes off by himself.

Believing that the beast is guarding the mountain, the boys agree to Piggy’s suggestion that they build a signal fire on the rocks near their bathing pool. As they work, however, several of the older boys slip off to follow Jack. With this new band of hunters, Jack pursues a sow caught feeding her litter. Running the sow down, the boys fall on her in a frenzy and kill her. Then, as an offering to the beast, they mount the pig’s severed head on a stake.

Unbeknown to Jack and his band, Simon, hidden beneath some vines, has witnessed their ritual. When the other boys leave, Simon has a silent conversation with the pig’s head—“the Lord of the Flies”—during which it seems to reveal to him that the beast is actually something within the boys themselves. Jack and his followers, smeared with body paint, burst into Ralph’s camp, and Jack invites everyone to join his band and feast on roast pig.

Meanwhile, Simon inches his way to the mountaintop, where he discovers the dead parachutist. All the other boys, including Ralph and Piggy, have gone to Jack’s camp to eat the pig. Under the threat of a downpour, they begin to dance and chant, miming the killing of the sow. Suddenly, Simon bursts into their circle, trying to tell them of his discovery. The boys, maddened by the chanting, attack and kill him, thinking him the beast.

Ralph and Piggy return to their camp. Only Sam and Eric and the littluns remain with them, and all deny—to themselves as well as to one another—any responsibility for the killing of Simon. Later, Jack and two of his hunters attack them. Ralph and Eric fight viciously, but in the end, Jack and his party make off with Piggy’s glasses, which they need to light a fire of their own.

When Ralph, Piggy, and Samneric go to Jack’s lair to demand the return of the glasses, Jack’s followers seize Samneric, and Ralph and Jack fight until Piggy, holding the conch, demands a chance to speak. As Piggy speaks, drawing a line between savagery and order, Roger, standing watch on a cliff overhead, sets loose a boulder that crashes down on the boys, smashes the conch, and crushes Piggy’s skull. Alone now, Ralph runs; he is pursued by Jack and his followers, who are hurling spears, but he manages to escape.

Later, Ralph creeps back to the encampment and discovers that Samneric, threatened with torture or worse, have become part of Jack’s tribe. They tell Ralph that Jack has sharpened a stick at both ends and will hunt him down.

In the morning, Ralph is discovered and forced out of his hiding place. Pursued, he manages to wound two of the boys, but when he attempts to hide again, the hunters light a fire to smoke him out. The chase becomes a frantic fight for life that ends when Ralph suddenly comes upon a uniformed naval officer whose cutter is moored on the beach. “We saw your smoke,” the officer says, grinning at what he presumes to be a boys’ game of war.

Lord of the Flies is a kind of parody of Robert Michael Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), a Robinson Crusoe-type story that was once popular with English boys. Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding’s modern characters are schoolboys marooned on an island while fleeing the horrors of an unspecified nuclear war. In the absence of adult rules and institutions, their behavior grows increasingly uncivilized, until the dominant band actually begins killing boys. The novel concludes at the moment that the band is about to capture Ralph, the last civilized boy. The bloodthirsty chase is interrupted by the sudden appearance on the beach of a British naval officer, who thinks the boys are merely playing. An unspoken irony is the fact that the warship of the ostensibly civilized officer is itself in the midst of a deadly manhunt.

First published in 1954, The Lord of the Flies became an American campus favorite during the 1960’s. Since that time it has been challenged in many school districts because of its graphic violence and occasionally profane language—but particularly because of its pessimistic view of human nature.

The novel has been adapted to film twice. In 1963 a black and white film version was made in Britain. A color version filmed in 1990 updated the story’s setting and replaced the British public-school boys with young American military cadets.

New Character
The boy with the mulberry-colored birthmark—He is not identified by name because, at the time, Piggy had failed to get the names of all the boys. His birthmark is a strikingly noticeable feature, however. That is why the boys notice he is missing after the fire.

Summary
Having returned from the mountain with Jack and Simon, Ralph blows the conch and calls another meeting. The boys assemble on the tree trunks around the clearing, which they now refer to as “the platform.” Ralph informs them that the expedition has determined they are on an uninhabited island. Jack quickly interjects that, because of this and the presence of pigs, there is now a need for an...

Summary
The chapter opens with Jack hunting a pig with a five-foot sharpened stick. He moves stealthily through the jungle on all fours following tell-tale signs left by the animals: cracked twigs, tendrils of creeper vines polished smooth by the bristles of passing pigs, and hoofprints. He sniffs the air for information and examines some fresh droppings. He spots some tracks that lead to a pig-run behind some vines and hears a pig moving in the vines. Jack hurls his weapon, but the spear misses and “the promise of meat” runs maddeningly away.

He returns to the beach where he finds Ralph standing by a marginally successful attempt at building a hut. He asks Ralph for something to drink, and...

New Characters
Henry: Biggest of the littluns. Distant relative of the boy with the mulberry-colored birthmark. He is teased by Roger.

Percival Wemys Madison: One of the smallest of the littluns, a “mouse-colored boy” not very attractive “even to his mother.” Plays on the beach with Johnny and Henry. Cries a lot. Thought a little batty by the others.

Summary
The chapter opens with exposition that establishes the beauty of the island and the lazy rhythm of the castaways’ daily lives; they play all day. The midday seems to cause hallucinations in them that Piggy calls “mirages”:

Summary
Ralph walks down a narrow path, concerned about the up-coming meeting. “He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.” He is determined that the meeting “must not be fun, but business.” He wanders past the bathing pool and contemplates their meeting place (called “the platform”). He notes that one of the essential distractions is a springy log that the children bounce on instead of concentrating on the meeting. He notices no one has taken the time to fix the...

New Character
Parachutist: Killed in an air fight over the island, his dead body lands on the mountainside and is, from a distance, mistaken for the beast by the boys.

Summary
When Percival’s nightmare ends, Ralph and Simon carry him to a shelter and the boys eventually settle into an uncomfortable sleep. As they sleep, 10 miles above the island, aircraft from the war are engaged in an air fight. A plane explodes, and unbeknownst to the boys, the corpse of a pilot parachutes onto the island. It lands on the side of the mountain and comes to rest in a sitting position, the lines tangle and anchor him to the rock. The wind, catching the parachute, causes the corpse to rock...

Summary
Still in pursuit of the beast, Jack is leading the boys along a pig-run, and Ralph is content to follow. They stop to eat some fruit, and Ralph, suddenly aware of the heat and his own griminess, longs for a chance to wash his shirt, cut his hair, wash with soap, and cut his nails. He notices that his nails are bitten down to the quick, but does not remember doing it. Then he observes the others and their similarly disheveled appearances, and notes that they have all accepted these changes as normal.

Ralph wanders down to the beach and contemplates the ocean on the far side of the island. He considers its vastness, and it reminds him of their hopeless situation and their limited chance for...

Summary
Piggy, upset by the news that the beast exists, stares up at the mountain from the beach. Ralph assures him that it does indeed exist. Piggy questions it again and Jack nastily tells him to go see for himself. Ralph adds that it had teeth and “big black eyes.”

Ralph is worried because the beast squats near where they must build the signal fire. “We’re beaten,” he says. Jack offers his hunters and Ralph calls them “Boys armed with sticks.” Jack angrily walks away and calls a meeting by blowing the conch.

He tells the others that he’s seen the beast. He tells them that Ralph thinks the hunters are no good and cowards. Jack accuses Ralph of being like Piggy and of...

Summary
Simon wakes from his seizure-induced sleep and makes a decision, “What else is there to do?” There is no reply, even from within. He leaves his secret place. He travels to the mountain where the figure of the dead parachutist rocks in the breeze. Despite his fear, he approaches the figure and sees that, like the pig’s head, it too is covered with flies. Simon crawls close to the figure and looks into its face and finally understands what it truly is. “Then the wind blew again and the figure lifted, bowed, and breathed foully at him. Simon knelt on all fours and was sick till his stomach was empty.” Then, despite his revulsion, he frees the parachutist’s lines from the rock so that it is no...

New Characters
Wilfred: A member of Jack’s tribe, beaten in punishment for an unnamed offense.

Stanley: Tribal member, asks if they really killed Simon.

Summary
Piggy carefully watches Ralph approach. Somehow, Ralph still maintains his leadership charisma, despite what happened to Simon. He is limping, bruised, and has dead leaves in his hair. Together, they determine that only Ralph, Piggy, Samneric, and some littluns remain loyal to the conch. Ralph and Piggy sit on the platform facing the shell.

Ralph begins to talk about Simon and what happened. He says it was murder. Piggy insists that it is no good to talk about it like that. He says it was...

Summary
It is dawn on the beach, and Samneric watch as Ralph tries unsuccessfully to restart the fire from embers in the ashes. “Piggy sat expressionless behind the luminous wall of his myopia.” He is livid over the loss of his glasses, insisting Ralph call a meeting, even though it is only him, Ralph, and Samneric.

Ralph blows the conch and Piggy takes it and says, “I can’t see no more and I got to get my glasses back. Awful things has been done on this island. I voted for you for chief. He’s the only one who ever got anything done. So now you speak, Ralph, and tell us what. Or else—.”

Ralph tries to respond but is unable to bring his response to a definite point. He...

New Character
Naval officer: He is the first ashore from the rescue ship to encounter the boys.

Summary
Ralph lay in hiding in the jungle assessing his wounds. He is close to Castle Rock for his pursuers did not follow him far. He glimpses a savage he believed was Bill, but “This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and shirt.”

As the afternoon wanes, he sneaks closer and sees Robert, armed with a spear, idly manning a sentry post. Behind Robert, a cooking fire is roasting the pig. Ralph’s mouth waters. A figure gives Robert a piece of meat and Robert begins to eat. Ralph retreats to eat some fruit, knowing...